How the Women in White Made the President Look Powerless

Mari Uyehara on Trump's State of the Union and how a diverse coalition of Democrats stole the spotlight.

There was little substantively to differentiate Donald Trump’s second State of the Union address from his first delivered last year. Despite a penchant for calling Democrats “evil,” “unhinged,” and an “angry mob,” he called again for unity. He recycled his promise to lower prescription drug prices and rebuild infrastructure, made outlandish claims about wage growth, and bragged about energy exports.

Among his special guests, once again, he praised an Hispanic-American ICE agent, and called upon grieving parents of a child who was murdered by an immigrant, to push the false narrative that immigrants are criminals contra evidence that they commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans.

Characteristic of his rhetorical habits, his speech was again peppered with preposterous greatest-ever-style superlatives and outright lies, and characteristic of his delivery on script, he was low energy, his voice at times faltering. But this week, the iconography of the House gallery couldn’t have been more different; Trump’s canned speech became the backdrop for a new narrative: growing female empowerment.

Last year, former House Speaker Paul Ryan sat behind Trump next to his older carbon copy, Mike Pence, blankly smiling like a blinking blue-eyed doll, clapping and nodding approvingly as the president blustered about tax cuts for the rich. The camera repeatedly panned to a gallery of nodding dark suits.

At times, the camera rested on Nancy Pelosi, who neither smiled nor clapped when Trump lectured on coming together: “Tonight, I call upon all of us to set aside, our differences, to seek out common ground, and to summon the unity we need to deliver for the people. This is really the key. These were the people we were elected to serve.”

This year, Trump again made his empty call for collaboration: “We must reject the politics of revenge, resistance, and retribution and embrace the boundless potential of cooperation, compromise and the common good.” But this time, in an instantly iconic moment, Pelosi, fresh off winning back the House of Representatives with a 40-seat gain, bemusedly and aggressively golf-clapped at Trump as he looked up at her, launching a thousand clapback memes.

After two years of Republican men prostrating themselves at Trump’s feet, backing down with mealy-mouthed rebukes of inexcusable behavior, he was now met with the inescapable vision of female disapproval—and power. Trump had learned his lesson with Pelosi. Back in December when he met with her and Schumer, Trump tried to pull a habitual diminishment “in a situation where it’s not easy for her to talk right now.” Pelosi immediately shut down the distortion: “Mr. President, please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats, who just won a big victory.” Unlike the Republican men who grimace and bear Trump’s falsehoods and degradations, Pelosi wasn’t going to let it slide.

She told reporters that the clapping “wasn’t sarcastic,” but her daughter Christine tweeted, “oh yes that clap took me back to the teen years. She knows. And she knows that you know. And frankly she’s disappointed that you thought this would work. But here’s a clap."

That wasn’t all: Pelosi shook her head and muttered “no” when Trump claimed the state of the union was strong. She read papers while he spoke. She smirked and chuckled. After all, Trump was only standing there in the galley, reciting his lines, because Pelosi had allowed him to be there.

She wasn’t alone either. The camera this year panned to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) rolling her eyes, Sen. Kamala Harris (D—Calif.) shook her head in disbelief—just two of the five women running for President in 2020—and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) staring dead-pan straight ahead. That collective female derision—rolling up from the 2017 Women’s March and into an unprecedented wave of women running for office—was now registering right there in faces of elected government.

Part of it was choreographed, the 89 female Democratic House members—including the first two Native American women (Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids), the first Muslim women (Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar), and the youngest congresswomen ever elected (29-year-olds Ocasio-Cortez and Abby Finkenauer)—wore white in a pointed evocation of suffragettes. They stayed seated as Trump made some of his more preposterous statements, looking to one another in shared disgust. Former Georgia House minority leader Stacey Abrams, a black woman who came within an inch of winning the governorship, delivered the Democratic response, packed with a raft of policy and homing in on voting rights. After years of denigrations about so-called Democratic identity politics, the Democratic House women had showed up in a stunning display of diversity and gender empowerment played right.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D—Mass.) tweeted: “The women of the #116th were asked to wear white tonight in tribute to the #suffragetes Tonight, I honor women like #AlicePaul who led the movement & women like #IdaB who were excluded from it. Kente cloth & the color white. Holding space for both #womanists & #feminists, always.” And Ocasio-Cortez likewise explained: “I wore all-white today to honor the women who paved the path before me, and for all the women yet to come. From suffragettes to Shirley Chisholm, I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the mothers of the movement.”

"You weren’t supposed to do that,” the president said somewhat helplessly, ceding the framing of his message to the women in white.

Their striking display made for one unchoreographed moment when Trump unwittingly pronounced that: “No one has benefited more from our thriving economy than women, who have filled 58 percent of the newly created jobs in the last year.” It was supposed to be a rote line on the economy. But the newly elected class of female representatives instinctively reinterpreted it—many of them, like Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez, having unseated men—and jumped to their feet, clapping and cheering, for the tidal wave of women newly in elected jobs, in part a reaction to a campaign twisted with virulent misogyny. “You weren’t supposed to do that,” the president said somewhat helplessly, ceding the framing of his message to the women in white.

Neither was the show of female power entirely symbolic. Trump had assented and ended the 35-day government shutdown without getting any concessions on his border wall. That came within days of Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants, announcing that the union was “mobilizing immediately” over the shutdown, with a righteous speech. And after Pelosi had already told Trump that there would be no money for a border wall. While billionaire donors, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Ryan had given way to Trump, he was getting boxed politically in by female leadership in unions and in government. And he was getting beaten at his own game of owning the news cycle.

The two images that emerged as the defining moments of what was to be the master of media’s State of the Union were Pelosi’s power clap and a determined Ocasio-Cortez striding down the hall in all white, a gaggle of male reporters looking on. Ocasio-Cortez, after facing absurd insults of both older Democrats and conservative blowhards, just announced a resolution for the New Green Deal with Sen. Ed Markey (D–Mass.). It was a bookending of female American political power: the steady hand of legislative mastery from a California grandmother of nine, who had successfully defended Social Security and passed healthcare, and a 29-year-old Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx breathing new life into public debates on taxes and climate change with bold policies and social-media savvy, sometimes even clashing with one another. The political debate now emerging was one between Democratic women and generations, with a shriveling white male id presidency increasingly sidelined on account of empty border-wall promises few Americans care for with little in the way of concrete policy for the pressing issues of healthcare, climate change, and jobs.

In a previous winning bout, Pelosi had belittled “Trump’s shutdown,” as she called it, as a “temper tantrum” and called it a “tinkle contest with a skunk.” After that, instead of delivering one of his diminishing insults as nicknames, he meekly pronounced: “Nancy Pelosi—or Nancy, as I call her.” The days after Pelosi stole Trump’s show, he had nothing to say, either. Now as then, Trump seemed to understand that this was now Nancy’s House.